Saturday, February 25, 2012

The right wing's ancient evil

Infidel753
was born in New York state, grew up in California, and now lives in
Oregon. His area of academic specialization was the Middle East. He is
a life-long atheist and long-time liberal with a special interest in
social issues and technology.

(Ed. note: This is Infidel's fourth guest post for us. You can find his first, on the ignorant fundamentalism of the Republican Party, here; his second, on the incoherence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, here; and his third, on the parasitism of Romney and Bain, here. -- MJWS)

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I suppose this proposed Virginia law, which I first heard about via Progressive Eruptions,
was the final straw -- but I've known for a long time that there's far
more at stake this year than in an ordinary election. We're facing a
bizarre, atavistic evil here. It does not control the whole Republican Party -- yet -- but wherever they attain power, so does it.

It's
not enough that our country has become a land where a few people who
have learned to game the system accumulate obscene wealth by destroying
jobs and producing nothing of value, while the incomes of the workers
who produce everything of value stagnate. It's not enough that taxes on
the wealthiest have been cut relentlessly for half a century until, we
are told, the government can no longer afford to provide even the
threadbare safety net we've come to know. It's not enough that the
opposition elite's hand-picked candidate for the presidency is a man
whose career exemplifies these nation-wrecking trends. No, there's
something even more dark and horrible looming behind all that.

This
is a war against modernity and modernity's central premise, the value
system based on the individual's right to self-determination so long as
his or her actions do not interfere with the self-determination of
others, in favor of the older value system based on arbitrary taboos and
edicts recorded in ancient religious texts, where our lives should be
shaped not by our own desires but by the plans supposedly drawn for us
by an imaginary deity. I could fill paragraphs with examples of the
sophistry and obfuscation I've seen Republicans use to re-frame
opposition to abortion and birth control so as to avoid mentioning the
issue of women's self-determination -- to make the question about anything
other than individual choice. That's the basic clash of world-views
here: is your life your own, to be run based on your own wishes, or are
you created as a utensil for some divine plan?

Theirs is clearly a
religious world-view, even if the divine plan was replaced by the will
of the state in earlier, semi-secularized variants of it (Fascism and
Communism). Hence, too, the sin-and-punishment model exemplified by the
Virginia law. Any supposed medical purpose is window dressing; the
point is to humiliate a person who (must have) violated a sexual taboo
and is now trying to evade the divinely-ordained punishment. If the Old
Testament's dietary laws were still taken seriously by fundamentalists,
they might be proposing laws to require similar degrading treatment for
people who seek medical help for food poisoning after eating shellfish.

The
sin/punishment model suffuses all their thinking. Republican rhetoric
about the poor and unemployed is laced with a penalizing stance.
Drug-test them, take away their benefits, impose this or that rule --
punish, degrade, humiliate. In the religious model, suffering is
redemptive, so the more of it the better. It's sadism and deliberate
cruelty, puffed up with a stance of moral superiority.

One sees
the same in the conservative austerity policies being forced on southern
Europe by the EU bureaucracy, privileging deficit reduction over jobs
at a time of brutal unemployment. Never mind that the economic
contraction caused by austerity is destroying the basis of future growth
which would actually reduce the deficits. Solving the problem is not
the point. The bureaucrats ignore the terrible suffering austerity
creates -- if anything, they seem to relish it. Sin must be punished.
The moral superiority of the north over the south must be asserted. And
of course Republican deficit hawks in the U.S. are eager to impose the
same sick model here.

It's no wonder that gays are such a target
of choice. Their very existence is not allowed by the taboo system. In
the fundamentalist world-view, there are no gay people, just a special
case of sinful temptation and the necessity of resisting it. Even if
gay sex can't be criminalized any more (and don't doubt for a moment
that these people would still do that
if they could), gays must be excluded from marriage, excluded from the
military, excluded from teaching, excluded, excluded, excluded. The
casting-out of the taboo-breaker, the branding with the scarlet letter,
the public verdict "there is something wrong with you, you are not fit
to be among us" -- that is the point.

Everywhere
where they took power in 2010, they've been showing their true colors.
Attack gays, attack women's self-determination, attack the poor.

It's
always mostly about sex, of course. Repressed people are always
fixated on it. There was never any real-world possibility that
shellfish would be an issue. 95% of the Christian Right's obsessions
are about other people's sexual self-determination and how to stop them
from transgressing taboos. And like other psycho-sexual criminals, they
escalate over time. So they have now reached the point of decreeing
that women in Virginia who seek abortions be subjected by law to a
procedure that meets the legal definition of rape. And make no mistake,
if they get away with that, the next thing they come up with will be worse. It won't stop until somebody stops it.

The opposition today no longer embodies the spirit of Eisenhower and Goldwater,
but that of the robber baron and the Grand Inquisitor of centuries
past. Its face is no longer Reagan's sunny optimism, but the rapist's
triumphant snigger.

There is one other matter which is seldom raised, but which is desperately important for the future of our country.

The world is entering an era in which proficiency in science and technology will outweigh everything
else. The pace of technological change has accelerated beyond what
seemed possible even a decade or two ago. In the world of the near
future, it is the nations with the best brains that will lead. A nation
that bets on cheap labor will not lead. A nation whose science classes
teach that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that solid scientific fact
must be rejected if it contradicts primitive dogma, will not lead. A
nation where every proposal for major government investment in public
education is met with whining about the burden on the taxpayers, will
not lead. The right wing is setting up our children to be the hewers of
wood and drawers of water for the Germans and Japanese.

We've got
to win this thing. Re-electing Obama is necessary (think Supreme Court
picks) but not sufficient. We must take back the House from Boehner and
the teabagging lunatics who are so extreme even he
can barely cope with them. We must restore a filibuster-proof majority
in the Senate, plus a margin of error to allow for a few Blue Dogs. We
must make sure Elizabeth Warren
gets in this year, so she'll be in position to run for President in
2016 and finish the work Obama started. We must get Walker and the
other union-busting Kochroaches out.
But beyond that, we must smash the troglodytes and bullies on the
other side so hard and bury them so deep that they can never, ever dig
themselves out to torment and destroy the decent people of this country
again.